Reviewer:
Wilford B. Wolf
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June 21, 2005
Subject:
The black market still flourishes
Newsreel clip covering the state of Japan as the American occupation after World War II was fully underway. The footage covers the devistation the Japanese faced immediate after the war. It appears that most of the footage was shot in and around Shinjuku in Tokyo, now the busiest railroad station in the world, and the site after World War II of one of the most notorious black markets. The clip does mention how many Japanese city dwellers had to resort to either building shelters from the rubble or going to the countryside where food was mariginally more plentiful. Interestingly, yet not wholy surprising, the wartime epitaph of "Jap" is still used here, though the animalizing rhetoric is greatly reduced now that the US is in control.
This clip does suffer from some jutter and there is some video noise evident from the clip.